Afghanistan: The night I was 'killed in action' by a Taliban ambush

In the week that Sir David Richards, the new head of the British Army, called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan, foreign correspondent Nick Meo came so close to death in a Taliban bomb ambush that the US forces had him written off as a fatality.

The convoy started with a line from a second-rate war film. "I've got a bad feeling about this mission," said Major James Becker, as his unit of National Guardsmen - the US version of the Territorial Army - and Afghan National Police set off through the chaotic traffic of Kandahar city.

The sun was setting in front of us behind the sharp mountains that lie just off Highway One to Helmand province. Easyrider, a company of part-time soldiers who had been in Afghanistan for six months, was on a routine trip from Kandahar to its base in Helmand where it was training police.

It was a route they had taken many times and, although they expected to be attacked, they were confident they could handle whatever the Taliban threw at them.

"We'll get shot at, I guarantee you 100 per cent," Becker, a prison officer back in the United States, had said when I had joined his unit half an hour earlier. He had a dreadful Mohican-style army haircut that made me think of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.

"But this vehicle has the strongest armour in the US military," the major continued. "You couldn't be safer than in this baby."

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His baby was a Cougar, a massive armoured truck built to withstand the roadside bombs that have wrought such carnage in Iraq and are now doing the same to British and US troops in Afghanistan.

The Cougar was meant to clear a way along roads where bombs or mines are laid, and it was leading the convoy, with Becker commanding from the passenger seat.

At the wheel was Mitch Chapman, a young New Yorker who cheerfully told me that he had never driven the 13-ton monster before. He apologised in advance for his driving and told me to strap in tight with the racing driver's harness. His advice was to save my life.

On top, manning the heavy machine-gun, with his head poking out of the vehicle's hatch, was Scott Dimond, a 39-year-old father of four. I didn't talk to him before we set off, which in a way I am now grateful for. Less than an hour later he was dead.

Dimond was busy scouring the road ahead for signs of bombs, so he didn't join the banter much. "Chappie" did most of the talking - about a girl back home and his mom, as well as about Afghanistan - as the soldiers tried to force a way through the chaotic traffic, firing flares at drivers who wouldn't move and trying to spot which cars might be driven by suicide bombers. One flare bounced off the windscreen of a lorry driver who came too close.

"You sure see some whacked-out stuff in this country," Chappie said, as an Afghan in a turban went past us clinging to the roof rack of a crowded Toyota car going the other way.

The soldiers talked at one point about how much the Department of Defence paid for a dead or wounded soldier, and how much they hated being in Afghanistan, although before we set off several had said to me, with bright-eyed enthusiasm, that they were sure American soldiers had to stay the course. "They need us here," said one.

The New Yorkers in the unit said they were in Afghanistan because of September 11. Others insisted they were stopping terrorism.

The police training mission given to these Guardsmen was a worthwhile job, they told me earnestly, because the Afghan army and police would be the exit strategy for America one day, when Afghan security forces were ready to take over.

The bomb hit us about half an hour's drive west of Kandahar, after nightfall, when we were deep in Taliban territory in an area of pomegranate orchards and opium fields called Zhari.

There was a boom. The huge vehicle seemed to roll over and I found myself hanging upside down in the harness, with screams in my headphones and small-arms fire outside.

I hung there for a couple of minutes, unable to believe what had happened and waiting for instructions from the crew. As the gunfire outside became louder, I fumbled for the release button, then fell awkwardly.

I groped in my pocket for a light and switched it on. I looked around on the floor among the spilt ammunition, cans of food and bits of clothing, for the little video camera I had carried on my lap. Through a window, I could see lines of red tracer.

For the first time I realised that although we had survived the bomb, we could still be in real trouble.

Chappie and Becker were both injured and in pain. "Where the hell are those guys?" one of them was shouting. Chappie had blood running down his face. "Why haven't they come for us?" There was fear in the voices.

By now there was terrific gunfire and I could hear a heavy machine-gun thumping. It seemed to be some distance away and I guessed it was a Taliban ambush. As we had been travelling at the front of our column, for all I knew we could now be cut off.

I suddenly realised what could happen if we fell into the hands of the attacking Taliban. With dread, I recalled what I'd read about the fate of Red Army prisoners.

I wondered if I would be able to explain that I was a journalist if men in turbans dragged me out of the crippled vehicle and I tried to recall a few phrases of Pashtun. I hoped they would understand "journalist" if I waved a notebook at them, but decided that it probably wouldn't help much.

I crawled to Chappie and Becker at the front. "What should I do?" I asked. The major said: "Where the hell's Dimond?" I realised then that there was no sign of him inside the vehicle.

Then there was a shout outside at the back. I couldn't make out the language. I scrambled to the rear doors and peered through the bombproof window. I saw, to my immense relief, an American soldier, frantically signalling me to open up.

The armoured doors were heavy, upside down and lying at an awkward angle. After a horrible moment when it seemed they had stuck in the explosion, I got them open by forcing them with my shoulder, then fell out of the truck into a huge crater that looked like something out of the First World War.

The gunfire was deafening and I suddenly felt terribly vulnerable. The soldier, who was about 19 and looked as scared as I felt, indicated that I should run to where two armoured vehicles had parked together. But I wasn't running those 20 yards until I was sure we weren't being shot at. I waited a couple of minutes, then summoned my willpower and sprinted while bent double, a surprisingly natural position when you think you're being shot at.

Crouching between the vehicles, I watched as infantrymen poured fire into the night. They had no night-vision goggles or flares, and some were standing in the beams from their vehicle headlights. Heavy machine-guns and grenade-launchers were hammering furiously in what the Americans call suppressive fire, to keep the enemy's heads down.

The British would have regarded this level of fire as excessive, and perhaps even trigger-happy. Thousands of rounds must have been used.

It dawned on me that there could be Afghan homes out there. I thought of all the villages I have driven past on this road when it was safe for journalists to travel in a taxi.

A sergeant ran up to one of the Humvees. With the major injured and still trapped in the Cougar, he seemed to be the man in charge. "Turn this thing around and shine those lights. I want to know what's out there," he bellowed.

I realised that I couldn't hear the snap, whistle or impact of any bullets. The soldiers seemed to think they were being shot at, but I didn't detect any incoming Taliban fire. Easyrider's casualty figures would surely have been higher if trained guerrillas had followed up the bomb with an ambush.

Slowly, the American firing subsided and the wounded were brought out of the crippled Cougar and put in the back of a Humvee. Our vehicle was lying on its roof, with a 12-foot crater just behind it where the bomb had been buried and into which I had fallen.

A soldier shouted at me in an alarmed voice to turn off my video camera and I thought it best to climb into the remaining undamaged Cougar to be safe from any enemy fire - and from the panicky soldier if things got nasty. Later another soldier demanded my camera "as evidence", and I had to insist that the army's rules allowed me to film.

When everything was over and I was getting ready to board the helicopter out, the soldier who had shouted at me thumped me affectionately on the body armour and apologised.

In the Cougar, I crawled into a space under the top gunner where huge brass cartridge cases spilled out from his weapon and fell on my shoulders as he fired into the night.

The Guardsmen were now getting better organised and calling headquarters over the radio. "We need help out here," one of them told the controller in a nice safe office back at Kandahar airfield, where I wished I was. His voice was tense and once or twice he sounded on the verge of panic, although he kept it together. He snapped at the controller: "This is Easyrider. We've been hit. We need help."

The firing died down as we waited for reinforcements. My mouth was dry, so I drank a bottle of water. Then I needed to urinate, but when I got of the vehicle I was so scared of being shot I couldn't go.

I couldn't understand why there were no helicopters yet. A sergeant switched on a night-vision camera and saw what he decided was a bunker, although God knows what it really was. He directed one of the heavy guns to fire at it. I hoped it wasn't an Afghan family's house.

He lit a cigarette. I was tempted to ask for one, but I remembered that I had given up smoking 12 years ago because I wanted to live a long and healthy life.

"This here's a marijuana field," the sergeant said between tokes, indicating a side of the road that must have been pulverised with fire. It was the nearest to a moment of comedy in the entire evening.

Then Major Becker came to my vehicle and asked if I was OK. He had a limp and looked haunted. We talked for a minute before he held my gaze and said: "I'm sorry."

I didn't quite know what to say and mumbled something sympathetic about his gunner. By then it was obvious that Dimond had been blown out of his hatch and the vehicle had landed on top him. It must have corkscrewed in the air to have landed as it did.

As I was examining it, an Afghan interpreter with a neat moustache and the looks of a matinée idol came up and asked if I had been in it.

"They were going to put me in there, but switched me to another vehicle at the last moment," he said. He stared at me for a minute, eyes wide, then hurried away with a look of horror as if being in my proximity caused death.

By now a Medivac helicopter was on the way. I wasn't wounded, except for bruises, but I didn't want to take the same road back, so I asked to go aboard the Black Hawk if there was room.

It landed in a huge cloud of dust and we walked out across a ploughed field that smelled pungently of onions and climbed in. The major slumped in a corner, lit by a blue light from the control panel.

I sat in a rear seat and Chapman was loaded in his stretcher. An airman wearing a helmet and visor that was straight out of Star Wars handed me earplugs, then manned a machine-gun that pointed out of the craft's side.

We took off and skimmed the moonlit farms and deserts of Kandahar province. Within minutes we were flying over the weirdly shaped mountains that we had driven past less than two hours before and towards the great night-time glow of Kandahar airfield.

When we touched down on the tarmac, a small crowd of medics came up to the helicopter, some to grab Chapman's stretcher, some to help the major, and all with identical looks of concern mingled with fascination.

As I walked towards the terminal, not quite able to believe that I was back to safety, a young woman in army uniform introduced herself as Amy Bonnano, the Public Affairs Officer who had arranged my "embed".

"It's great to see you," she said. "We had you listed as Category A."

What did that mean? "It's the worst scenario. It means deceased."

Later in her office, as I was drinking tea and getting sympathy from a procession of officers who turned up to see a rare survivor of a roadside bomb, I noticed a Post-it note on her desk.